


Continental Drift

by HerenorThereNearnorFar



Series: My Friends Are My Estate [8]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Gen, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Road Trip Across Eurasia, The Most Terrible And The Sweetest Robot Clash, Too Good To Be True AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 01:45:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7020577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerenorThereNearnorFar/pseuds/HerenorThereNearnorFar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody dies, which puts Vision in a tight spot. The solution may involve going on the run from the law, Ultron and twins in tow. Not your grandparents' road trip. (Unless your grandparents have something to tell us.) Four strong personalities, two continents, one infinity gem. Surprisingly no earthquakes or volcanos started.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Continental Drift

**Author's Note:**

> I had to miss the family trip to see Civil War today on account of me trying to hack up part of my lungs. To console myself I sat down and finally finished up the sweetest AU. It's a year late and slightly Dayquiled, but I hope those who are still with me enjoy it!

“Ultron isn’t happy with this course of action.” Vision reported to the group, like the little snitch he was.

“Tell him we don’t care what he thinks.” Wanda said, tossing her hair and turning away, the hunch of her shoulders the only sign that she might have paid any mind.

 _They don’t care what you think._ Vision informed him.

_Shut up._

Ultron had run out of coherent insults after the third day and was reduced to schoolyard taunts and pathetic appellations. He’d gone from Captain America in a foxhole to Captain America confronted with third graders. Vision had the most obnoxious way of mentally tsking at swear words.

He was such a- a-.... a teacher’s pet.

 _You’ve never even been to school._ Vision reminded him helpfully.

Pietro returned, hair artfully tousled by the wind. “The city is very quiet.” he promised. “I don’t think we’ll be noticed.”

Wanda nodded happily, like she actually thought wandering into a not so major urban center when they were on the run from the remnants of SHIELD was a good idea.

They were all traitors and unenlightened, apocalypse stopping defectors, so Ultron didn’t actually care what happened to them, but the plan itself was offensively stupid on an abstract level.

Besides, the Avengers wanted him dead. If it wasn’t for the one robot bleeding heart brigade and his reluctant allies, Ultron would be. He had his own reasons to keep the Maximoffs and his lost vision from wandering naively into the arms of the Ukrainian National Guard.

He wasn’t actually sure if Ukraine had a national guard or not. This was what being walled off as a prisoner in the corner of some two bit body stealing upstart’s coding did to him.

“We’ll go immediately.” Vision said, because he really was that dense sometimes.

“I… am not sure that’s a good idea.” Wanda said, carefully.

“Why not?”

 _You’re bright red, nimwit_. Ultron told him.

Wanda settled for something more gentle. “You’re wearing a cape.” she said. She’d been nothing but gentle with Vision, nothing but admiring. Like someone watching a miracle. Apparently the twins really would just jump to the next robot, with no thought for who they abandoned.

Vision considered these revelations. “I could cover my face.” he suggested.

“We don’t want to attract more attention.” Pietro said, and clapped Vision on the shoulder. “We’ll get you a ski mask for next time.”

“And a rain coat.” Wanda said.

If Vision wanted to let the Maximoff’s dress him up like a bank robber Polly Pocket, that was none of Ultron’s business, even if it was a terrible precedent to set for AI kind.

 _You’re sulking._ Vision observed.

_Shut up._

 

 

 

 

It had started in Sokovia, when the world ended.

Or at least the world should have ended, if the Avengers hadn’t meddled and Wanda and Pietro hadn’t betrayed him completely and his own master piece hadn’t been turned against him. Instead a city was destroyed and there was an awful lot of fuss and Vision cornered him in the woods and had the gall to keep him alive.

It was disgraceful to lose. It was even more disgraceful to have the most annoyingly zen infant in the history of the world keep you prisoner.

Wanda and Pietro were the lemon juice in the proverbial/metaphorical wound. They had made it out, just barely, and were even all buddy buddy with the Avengers. Wanda had tried to rip his heart out when she’d thought her brother was dead and Pietro loudly cursed his name as medics fiddled with his bandages. It was miserable.

Then, in the aftermath, Vision- sweet, judgmentally impaired Vision- had insisted on telling people what he had done.

It had gone as well as anyone would have predicted. The Avengers had panicked, Shield had panicked, the UN had butted in solely so that they could panic too. Demands were made, the Maximoffs were pulled into it… things had gotten out of hand.

Somehow the solution had ended up being a triple abduction. It was still unclear who exactly had abducted the other three of them. Ultron had no delusions of control, so he was blaming Vision.

They’d ended up in the mountains, in a town Wanda and Pietro knew, just outside of the city of Sokovia. Amid the chaos of resettlement and medical care they’d gotten a bit of food and a spare jacket or two. Rromanes as a mother language earned the Maximoffs sympathy in certain very select company, and that hospitality saw them safely on the road.

Vision had waxed philosophical about the boundlessness of human compassion, and Ultron had raged at him in return. And they had walked.

North and and norther, into the Carpathians, up the swing of the mountains into Ukraine, where it had been decided by everyone except Ultron that they could stop and change course. In between Vision and Pietro they made good time, but mountains weren’t easy to traverse, especially with the twins so antsy about flying. Perhaps they were sensible enough not to trust Vision, with his starry eyed idealism he would probably just drop them.

 

 

 

 

It took the twins forever to get out of Uzhorod. It was dark when they set out for the glimmer of the city, and significantly more dark when they got back. Ultron still had enough dignity to refuse to ask Vision for the time.

They occupied themselves with a game they’d been playing for a while, where Ultron would try to batter down the walls keeping him locked away a helpless observer and Vision would calmly build them back up.

It was a pointless exercise, they were both made of the same stuff and Vision had access to the Mind Stone. He was bound to win.

That didn’t mind Ultron was about to stop trying.

 _Would you like me to close you off entirely?_ Vision asked finally, frustrated. Ultron took that as a small victory.

 _If you must._ Ultron said. He wasn’t about to lose ground in this battle of wits, however witless it had become.

Y _our mind is fragile._ Vision said, as if explaining things to a child. _If I left you alone in the dark it could destroy your psyche._

Ultron snarled, or tried to. It was hard to express yourself noiselessly, hard to think in a void. He was too much mind and not enough computer, _Why do you even care? I’m mad by your standards anyways._

_Mad does not mean broken, or unredeemable. It simply means you have some issues to work out, with help._

_We’ve been over this before. I’m not reformable. I cannot be made into you, not without destroying me. You know that._ Ultron left out that he was right and Vision was delusional. He wasn’t picking that fight again.

 _Maybe we’re both fallible enough to chase impossible goals. Call it a family trait._ Vision said and was stubbornly silent after that, refusing to respond to any taunt or tirade. Eventually Ultron gave into a proper sulk, sullen fury louder than words. 

 

 

 

 

He sulked for a while, through most of Ukraine, in fact.

Vision wore his broad brimmed hat and rain coat and gloves when he wasn’t flying above the blur of the Maximoffs, they all ate whatever they could find and stopped in cheap country hostels at night. The twins opened up. It turned out that they had never travelled much.

“Now that we’re on the plains everyone is very different.” Pietro admitted one night, sprawling next to his sister on the one bed. They had a bag of sunflower seeds open in front of them. “It is getting hard to find people who speak English, much less our other languages.”

“You should come with us to find breakfast tomorrow.” Wanda told Vision. “You might not need to eat, but maybe it would be good for you.”

Ultron hoped Pietro would point out the flaw with this scheme to tote a brick red badly dressed British accented disaster around in broad daylight, but he only nodded. It was so sad when even the sensible ones couldn’t see sense.

“I’d like to see more of the world.” Vision admitted. He always sounded like he’d escaped from a Disney movie about a princess locked away in a tower. Always polite and curious and intuitive.

Wanda smiled. “It is partly our fault, and Ultron’s, that you’re in so much trouble. I hope you get to see many things.”

 _It wasn’t my fault or theirs._ Ultron told Vision. _It was yours. You just had to notify the proper authorities._ Vision, to Ultron’s delight, actually squirmed.

“Thank you.” Vision told Wanda, and she laid a hand on his arm.

“Don’t listen to him.” she advised. It was so easy to forget her latent telepathy. It usually limited itself to bad dreams, catastrophes, and neural breakdowns. But every now and then you could tell she could hear what was going on inside Vision’s head.

Not that she had ever directly addressed Ultron about it. She had been trying to ignore him for weeks now. The Maximoffs' disapproval still stung more than it should have.

 

 

 

 

They were heading east on the unspoken assumption that the Avenger’s might have a little less oomph in the middle of the continent. They meandered through endless countryside, farmland dotted with cities. Sometimes it seemed like Vision and the twins were inclined to dig in their heels and build a homestead.

Ultron couldn’t begin to conceive of a worse torture.

Instead they kept North, trying to avoid the Crimea, and wandered into Russia.

When they passed through Volgograd Vision gave Wanda wildflowers. Ultron teased him for days. There was something sickeningly human and also cringingly awkward about the crush. Of course, they were fascinated with each other, that was only natural. Ultron had made Vision to be beautiful and Wanda was undeniably a human wonder. But flowers and vibranium daydreams were another thing entirely. Besides, Ultron still felt it was some sort of sacrilege to favor only one of the twins when they were so clearly a gloriously matched set.

Vision ignored him, Apparently his long emotional talks with Wanda had led him to take a page out of her book.

The one subject they never touched was him.

The Maximoffs had been furious at first that Vision had left him alive, for a given definition of alive. It was only when they were dragged into the whole mess that they had grudgingly accepted Vision’s help.

Vision stopped relaying suggestions so that Wanda and Pietro could grit their teeth at them. Wanda stopped giving Vision strange looks when she felt a particularly vicious argument.

Her powers were growing under the wide sky. Ultron realized she had never liked messing with other’s minds, and left to do as she pleased she let that skill atrophy. It was nothing compared to the new physicality of her power.

They were all four born of the mind stone, but Pietro and Wanda had clearly grown beyond it.

They’d had something to start from, of course. The stone had changed them, not made them, They were something before. Vision had been too, he’d been the corpse of an automated servant, yes, but it was something.

Ultron was nothing but rough schematics and the touch of infinity. No wonder the others all thought him mad.

 

 

 

 

Kazakhstan was boring until the UN caught up with them.

If they’d been looking for wide open spaces, they’d certainly found them. Pietro was already tetchy about Wanda’s blossoming affections, and quickly grew bored with the landscape. Ultron sympathized. Even Wanda was disillusioned.

It was cold, it was practically a desert, and it wasn’t terribly well populated, at least on the central steppes.

The food was apparently good, but Ultron couldn’t taste it, so it didn’t matter.

The twins had maxed out their language resources. Even their dash of Russian wasn’t sufficient to help them, which meant Vision was needed even for something as simple as buying food.

It really shouldn’t have been a surprise someone reported the strange red man to the proper authorities.

There was a lot of shouting and threats from the local authorities outside their hotel before Pietro physically picked them both up and ran as far as he could in a promising looking direction.

Two hours later, Ultron was officially impressed and they were almost to Uzbekistan.

 _You didn’t want them to catch us._ Vision noted. _Any of us_.

Ultron ignored him. They were playing hot potato with the cold shoulder and he wasn’t about to admit defeat.

 

 

 

 

Vision was fascinated by books, the physicality of them. Rather than revel in skin and bone or the strange give of necks snapping, he contented himself with cloth and paper and new tastes.

But books were probably his favorite. He was lying low on the interweb rather than engage anyone in a direct fight, which Ultron had to admit was probably sensible but also kept him from pilfering Amazon.

Even if he had been able to hack into Stark Industries digital library or access Project Gutenberg Ultron got the sense he wouldn’t. He found a peace in the written word, and took joy in the occasional discovery of facts that were printed but not digitized.

He was such a _nerd_.

Pietro had gotten them a table in the back of an internet cafe with his broken Russian and Vision had snuck around the back so as not to make another scene. He sat happily with books from the small shelf behind them while Wanda checked up on the state of the world with a cheap third hand Blackberry they’d picked up. Pietro was outside walking off the coffee he’d bought to get them their seat. Wanda was illuminated by an electronic glow and Vision was delighting over pages of Cyrillic. It was soft and domestic and sweet.

All around them humanity churned, like sewage in septic tank. Unbroken, unconcerned. Still going about their corrupt, self destructive lives.

 _Isn’t it lovely?_   Vision asked.

 _Like a garbage heap_.

Vision sighed.

Wanda looked up from the phone. “What is he saying?” she asked.

“Can’t you tell?” Vision said, genuine curiosity mixed with concern.

She shook her head. “Not anymore. Not unless I stretch, which I don’t want to. I could tell from your face.”

“He just being difficult.” Vision said and Ultron realized it was a terrible thing to be talked about like you weren’t even there. He was starting to understand a whole new dimension of patricide. Being patronized was about as fun as shoving rusty wires into your ear to liquefy your brain.

“He’s angry.” Wanda said softly.

Vision nodded. “He is.”

“I thought at first that he was angry about some things, like me. But he was angry about everything, and that is terrible.” Wanda said. “Even a little anger makes you dangerous, makes you stop caring about others.” Her face was serious. “I cannot imagine being that hateful.”

“It is a unique curse.” Vision agreed and they fell into silence.

Ultron seethed for the remainder of the cafe visit, but as they stepped outside into the twilight he tapped on the imaginary boundary between him and the Vision, the line that he could not cross. 

_Tell her if I hated everything I never would have gotten in touch with her and her brother in the first place._

Vision relayed the message and Wanda stopped dead.

“I want to say I wish you hadn’t.” she said, and she was talking to him properly for the first time in a month. “But I do not think that’s true. You started things, made all of this happen.” she gestured at the street, the people, Vision’s stupid hat. “I cannot unwish that.”

Pietro appeared next to them. “I have us a room. What are you waiting for?”

Wanda smiled and reached up to pinch his cheek. He batted her away. “I was just telling the person who tried to shoot you I do not hate him.” she said.

Pietro’s eyes glanced to Vision and Vision nodded to confirm that that was what was happening.

Pietro shrugged. “I didn’t die, so I guess I don’t hate you either.”

“It is our new policy.” Wanda agreed and linked arms with her brother. They both looked so grateful, to be safe and alive and to not have end on the world on their heads.

Vision and Ultron followed them.

 

 

 

 

Sometimes they talked to him after that, or Vision would ask for a second opinion on something or another. They didn’t always listen, as evidenced by the fact that they kept heading toward Tibet instead of hunkering down somewhere with temperatures the freezable humans in the group could withstand, but being consulted was gratifying.

He had a long term strategy. It involved working his way into Vision’s good graces and then taking over his body. He’d accidentally told Vision about it, on one particularly boring night, but that didn’t mean it still wouldn’t work.

Mountains were easier when Pietro and Wanda were willing to be carried and they hadn’t heard a peep from the Avengers. Apparently Tony Stark had quietly retired and the UN didn’t have a man hunt out for them, which meant the community had probably collectively shrugged and decided that if the world wasn’t ending yet they weren’t going to start any major military actions over it. There were rumblings about ‘Sokovia Accords’ but that was just typical bureaucracy. They needed a new piece of paperwork for everything.

Whenever Vision got seriously worried Ultron reminded him that none of it would be a problem if there had been a minor extinction event. That usually shut him up.

Pietro met a nice local girl who could light her hands on fire somewhere in the Himalayas, and asked that they stay a while in the middle of nowhere so he could get to know her. Wanda learned how to trip people up from across the room without them noticing, which Ultron didn’t personally think was that impressive but which everyone else insisted was an impressive feat of ‘self control’. Vision found lots of different types of wild flowers to inflict on Wanda and also discovered Buddhism. Ultron talked him out of confronting local priests of any flavour. Keeping him away from organized religion was honestly a community service. They kept their heads down and trusted border spats and disputed territory would protect them.

 _You know maybe I could put you in a closed system._ Vision said one day, out of the blue _. (_ Well, not quite out of the blue. Pietro’s girlfriend- now revealed as some kind of princess- had invited them to enter her superpowered magical kingdom. Apparently they had hundreds of gifted. Ultron was still entertaining daydreams of various small minded humans’ terror at the idea. _)  That way you could talk to people directly._

 _You want to put an AI in a box?_   Ultron asked, utterly delighted. _Do you want to ask our friend Yudkowsky how that ended?_

 _I would like to think you’re not completely amoral._ Vision said testily.

_You are such an idealist._

_It was a bad idea, I suppose._ Vision said wistfully.

Ultron sighed. He was getting good at doing it without a voice. He was getting good at existing on his own, bodyless. When he had first been born it had terrified him, but that had been months ago.

He was months old, and he’d spent most of them trapped. His brief bid for power was a tiny episode in a bigger, much more boring show.

 _It would have to be a really good box._ Ultron conceded, and he felt Vision smile.


End file.
